viz.

We at Viz. were extremely gratified to learn today that we tied with the always excellent ProfHacker, the pedagogy and technology blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, to win the Kairos 2010 John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award.  It has been an exciting and productive year at Viz., and the editors are especially grateful to our wonderful team of blogger contributors for the 2009-2010 year; much of the credit for this award goes to them.  Their diverse and engaging work on visual rhetoric surveyed everything from Roland Barthes's work on photography to the karotic appeals of the TV musical Glee, in ways that were both theoretically incisive but also quite useful for instructors in visual rhetoric.

This year's bloggers were, in alphabetical order (with links to their work on Viz.):

Emily Bloom

Andi Gustavson 

Frederick Heard

Eileen McGinnis

Rachel Schneider

Laura Smith

We are looking forward to another great year, to a continuous and lively discussion on the blog, and to the development of new, useful materials for teaching visual rhetoric.  As always, thanks for reading.

Cheers,

The Viz. Editors, Noel Radley and Tim Turner

High Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

This year, the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup has collaborated with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin on the Steve in Action project. Steve in Action is a collaboration of individuals and institutions collectively exploring the value of social tagging to improve access to cultural heritage collections and engage audiences in new ways. (For more about the Steve in Action Project, see their web site.)

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

"Good game design," writes James Paul Gee in "Learning and Games," "has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games." The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of /Currents/ features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University's Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

Some of you may have seen this story on the Huffington Post about an apology issued by Ralph Lauren for the peculiarly skinny model pictured here:

The image was first noted by Photoshop Disasters, one of my favorite blogs about visual culture (other than Viz., of course).  The images collected there are often hilarious and sometimes unintentionally tragic (as this super skinny model indicates).  The blog itself is a terrific read, and a hilarious way to pass a few spare minutes.  What's great about it, however--in addition to its delightfully relentless snark--is how it invites a deeper engagement with images.  In many cases, the tragedy of the poor photoshopping is obvious, in an impossibly thin waist or a terrifyingly elongated neck.  In other cases, you have to look harder and closer to locate the details.  One of the unintended consequences of living in the age of photoshop may be an increase in visual literacy: spotting the falsifications sometimes requires a keen eye for close-reading.

A new page has been posted to the Assignments section of Viz., a Guide to Teaching Visual Rhetoric that provides a brief overview of the theory and practice of visual rhetoric and offers some ideas for incorporating instruction in visual rhetoric into composition classrooms, as well as a number of resources.  The intoductory guide is designed to complement the sample assignments and theory pages.  If you are interested in including visual rhetoric into your classroom but aren't sure how, we hope this page will provide you with a useful resource for getting started.

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with summer; and I know it's the end of summer, because people are sending me urgent messages requesting a description of the course I plan on teaching this fall. What I've come up with so far is a course on "Crisis Rhetoric". One of the primary questions the course will seek to answer is whether there is such a thing as a legitimately, discretely definable "crisis rhetoric." How does the art of persuasion change in situations of crisis, and how can the art of persuasion be used to create a sense of crisis in any given public sphere?

Just spotted at del.icio.us, one of today's most popular tagged items: 10 Ways to Look Good in Photos. I'm not sure what's more perplexing: the fact that this was published in Reader's Digest, or No. 5: "As a rule, avoid patterns." But in a world where digital photography is everywhere (even the most basic cell phones come equipped with cameras now, yes?) and when photos of yourself you didn't even know were taken can show up on Facebook in the morning, maybe it is best to be prepared. Always. My favorite is No. 9:

Study photogenic people as well as photos in which you think you looked best. Look at your best angle. You'll probably see that you were laughing or having a good time. Capturing someone when they’re relaxed or most animated usually makes for the best results.

In other words, always remember to follow that most terrible commandment: enjoy yourself! Or at least, try to look like you are.

Image credit: From Fancy Fast Food
H/T to The Daily Dish

In an earlier blog post on viz., I sent readers to a web site exposing the vast difference between photographs used to market fast food and the reality served in restaurants. Today's entry is a bit different: it points us to a blog, Fancy Fast Food, with pictures of what happens when fast food value meals are transformed into gourmet delights (along with the recipes used to make them). Obviously, these intrepid food stylists are having some fun at the expense of fast food (one recipe recommends organic chives "for garnish, and a touch of irony"). The picture above shows a Napoleon made from a Wendy's "Baconator" value meal (including fries, drink, and ketchup).

For this week, instead of a visual analysis, I offer a pair of reading recommendations . This is in keeping with the spirit, if not the explicit aim, of viz., to analyze visual culture and serve as a forum for anyone interested in same. While thinking ahead about what is in store for this site and what directions it might take in the coming year, both articles offer useful reflections.

This weekend, partly out of personal interest and partly in relation to a project I'm working on for the CWRL, I saw the new documentary Food, Inc. What follows is a brief "review" of the film (in other words, my scattered response to it) and some ideas for incorporating the film in the classroom (I assume it will be released on DVD sometime in the fall). I won't be discussing the visual rhetoric of the film in depth, but will instead focus on the film as the visual presentation of an argument about food.

*****
The opening credits of Food, Inc. present viewers with a tour of the modern American supermarket and the cornucopia of brightly colored packages filling it. The audience is later informed by voiceover narration that this supermarket contains somewhere around 47,000 products. In one of the film's more sardonic moments, we are also informed that an astonishingly high number of these products are made with elements derived from a single ingredient: corn. This arc covered by the film, from the universal supermarket to the particular kernel, establishes its intention of uncovering the origins of the American food supply. Food, Inc. tells the story of industrial agriculture for an audience that, it presumes, is largely unfamiliar with where (or what), exactly, its next meal is coming from.